Would you buy a used foreign policy from these guys?

Question #1: Who's paying for it?

One reason that there is little accountability in American public life is that these private, but quasi-governmental think tanks don't have to divulge their donors, and make a habit of declining to do so.

The major think tanks are effectively organs of governance in modern America, and bureaucratic holding pens with revolving doors for the ruling elite. They generate and disseminate the propaganda for their causes, and dominate the policy apparatuses of the major parties.

Maybe it's time Americans demand to know who these people are and who's writing their checks?

On that score, it's more than a little troubling to discover that a number of fairly reasonable people agreed to show up at the group's initial conference on Afghanistan, being held today at the Mayflower Hotel.

Professor, where are you Guys?
Why didn't you join the party?
On one side the Neocons on the other the IL % Co.;->
Where are you Guys ? Where are you ?

if a physician misdiagnosed ailments with the same regularity that the neocons have misread world politics, only a patient with a death wish would remain in their care.

"Or a Deadman would remain in their care";->>
I think you Guys still expect Deadman to think.
Let me clearly declare it here:

"If you believe in State, State is dead! But the God don't die!".

In fact Freeman gave the first news about her death but you didn't want to believe him.

Anyway You Guys shouldn't miss the funeral;->>

Grand Sen~or.

The solution to the special interests' mess is banning all paid lobbying, in general. Paid lobbying distorts democracy. You want to petition your rep.? Write a letter or drop by.

Get lobbying $ out of govt.

The article by Professor Walt is frightening. That such people can possibly re-emerge from their burrows and be taken seriously in a country like the US is indeed a confirmation that the money the Israeli lobby has spread around to buy credibility and influence has enabled the likes of the dangerous neocons to infiltrate the previous administration so effectively. Their policies were of major interest to them but disastrous for the US, which even the naïve Bush was eventually able to determine. Now here they are again with a new “think tank”. Another win for Machiavellian thinking.
I would have thought that in earlier days in the US, the activities of the neocons, the blinkered lobby groups, think tanks and grafters trying successfully, so it seems, to influence the apparently very malleable Senators and Representatives, would have constituted almost treasonous behaviour, punishable by a prison sentence, but in the very least, as in this case, being sent back to the country they really represent, Israel. They are either Israeli controlled or US citizens…..you cannot be both. Just the deaths of 4,000 Americans should be reason alone for such punishment because if any war was manufactured by the US, it was the Iraq war, gestating as it had been for years in the minds of these evil people. The winners, the Israelis once again, the confirmed detractors of anything Arabian, the military-industrial complex and the losers, the families of 4,000 dead soldiers, countless others maimed for life, Iraqis by the hundreds of thousands, health, education and social security funding and a way of life now under threat for so many. Finally, there is the credibility of the US, perhaps lost forever in the minds of some countries.
It certainly did not benefit mainstream USA. These people do not have the interests of the US as their objective but the furthering of their own distorted ideals. They will not have altered one iota.

Just when it was thought that the US was cleansed of these evils, we find that they intend to emerge under a different guise. If they are tolerated by the gullible US politicians again this time, then there is no hope for equitable solutions in the middle east, when perhaps 2009 is really our last chance to reach an understanding.

I don't understand. I agree with you but you seem too hyped up. In other words, why don't you and your colleagues form a group to push for a two-state solution and against the false neo-conservative agenda.

Obama's on the right course. But he needs a constituency to back him up. There are people like me, neither Jew nor Arab, who believe that Middle East is the linchpin for solved a host of problems, not just Palestine/Israel, but nuclear proliferation, economic stagnation in the region, stability in Iraq, etc. It is, in other words, vital to US national security. I have been looking for and would gladly donate to a group pushing a two state solution, 1967 boundaries, divided Jerusalem.

Great stuff, Professor, many thanks. Not only is there no accountability in public life but Kagankristol et al are completely without shame. Thanks to our great 1st amendment (long may it stand) they are entitled to be totally embarrassingly wrong. But there are definitely people from inside the Bush administration -- the torturers, they know who they are -- who belong in jail. That's the real accountability issue of our time, and a real shame too.

And for the commenter who compared being wrong about pimping the Iraq war to Hillary's failed health care efforts in 1993, how is that a valid analogy? The Iraq warmongers got their invasion when the whole country was suckered into it, and the result was a mess. Hillary failed to accomplish much in the face of fierce opposition from the health care and other lobbies, and the result was the preservation of the status quo. Clearly you have a problem with myopia and should see an eye doctor straightaway.

On that score, it's more than a little troubling to discover that a number of fairly reasonable people agreed to show up at the group's initial conference on Afghanistan, being held today at the Mayflower Hotel.

this is ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. You really, I mean really are clueless on basics of political science and pluralist theory?!

That said, indeed Kristol is a maniac. Kagan is a better fellow, he actually knows something about the world.

The New York Times's Tom Friedman told a reporter from Ha'aretz has Iraq was "the war the neoconservatives wanted...the war the neoconservatives marketed,"

Ok, one last time Mr. Walt, and all the neocon conspiracy theorist and anti-semites in sheeps clothing - where were you when the war was argued? Where was the media? Where was the CIA, the MI6, DGSE, and countless other intelligence agencies...all in neocon hands!! Oh, and where were the Saudi's? Did they want Saddam in place for long?

Please, for once, answer this question!.

As for your ledger Mr. Walt-

No one is infallible, of course, but this was a policy error of extraordinary proportions.

No matter what the cost - it is and was worth it. Because it was not an error, and certainly not one of any exceptional proportions. 4000 dead is nothing as far as wars go - and I don't mean to say I want more dead - but please, let's be foreign policy people, not journalists! Trillion dollars, is just money. It did more for the economy than we'll ever be able to appreciate - defense related jobs accounted for nearly half of all jobs created fro 2000 to 2008. The dead Iraqis, is another question - but honestly we didn't kill them...it was the Saudi's who ran the terror networks within the country. The Saudi Wahabi bastards. It was and remain the Jihadis.

In a country that understood that foreign policy was serious business and that prized competence over ideology, anyone with a track record like theirs would simply not be taken seriously. Indeed, if there were a robust culture of responsibility here in the United States, Messrs. Kagan and Kristol might have the decency to fall silent, or turn their attention to other matters. I'm not advocating censorship, of course, just a sense of humility appropriate to their achievements.

This, Mr. Walt, is depraved. It is sad, and trully depressing. These men are heroes, and deserve heroes treatment. Their commitment to democracy - and hence to this great nation - is far greater than yours, which is why you are supported and ally with the Jihadis, anti-semites, anti-Westerners, and Saudi Wahabia. Kagan has a far closer rapport with the military, than any of you Ivory Tower types. Kristol, the SOB he may be, has done more in intelligence and PSYOP circles, than any of the the named and "unamed sources" you love to reference.

So the fate of the "Foreign Policy Initiative" should be regarded as a litmus test. Is the United States genuinely capable of learning from past mistakes, to include learning whose advice deserves to be ignored?

I personally dislike Kristol - he is a belligerent SOB, and it isn't always clear what he really believes in - strange as it sounds. Kagan, on the other hand - is another story. Overall, I appreciate the contributions of these people to the richness of America's foreign policy debate - just as I appreciate yours Mr. Walt, no matter how much I disagree with you. In one sense you have done more than Kagan and Kristol for democracy - you have taken your views to blogs, and thus opened them up to almost uncesored comment. Something the neo-cons should learn to do themselves.

For if there is anything you haven't really noticed about these guys, its that they are insular.

Mr. Walt, I know you and Mearsheimer have said:

That The United States should come to Israel's aid if its survival is ever in jeopardy

Hopefully we will have Israel shut down long before, so it should never be necessary. The way this should be done is like the Iranian President have proposed: All Palestinians and their descendants should ASP return and thereupon have a vote as how they wish to be governed.

A fair assesment of the outcome of such a vote would be, that Israel would then cease to exist. And that would be very beneficial for the world, which would then have got rid of its greatest terror-incentive and destabiliser in world politics.

Israel would then go to the scrap-heap of history, like any other odd colony allready have. And it would be democratically decided by the people between the Jordan river and the Meditaranean.

I assure you this is the future, this is the only sustainable long term solution, and it is a wish shared by the majority of the worlds peoples, who very often themselves have grave experiences with colonialism.

Without Israel, no financial crisis, no oilprices at 147 dollar last summer, with all its consequences for world food prices
It is Israel's fault that 9/11 happened. (1.motivating factor: Israels treatment of Palestinians. 2.motivating factor: US troops continued stay on holy Saudi soil after the end of the first Gulf War in 1991, despite King Fahd had been promised that they would be withdrawn. The man responsible for their continued stay was the Australian born super-zionist and -lobbyist, Martin Indyk, a US citizen from 1993 and later US ambassador to Israel). Without 9/11 no lowering of interest rates to prolong the good times. I think that Mr. Greenspan along with other New Yorker Jews wanted to issue a message: WE are not intimidated, we will go on regardless. They shall not be allowed to stop us. But in retrospect this lowering was fatal - allowing the houseprices to explode, laying the seeds to the current financial crisis.

The notion that Iran was next and the speculation associated with it made the price of oil spiral upward

The anticipation that Iran was next made the price of oil spiral upwards, reaching its zenit in July 2008 with 147 dollar a barrel, just around the time that it became clear that there would be no Iran war. A very high proportion of the price were due to speculation by hedgefunds and others. And the high price of oil was a major factor in the food crisis.

From The Weekly standard's "The Blog":
April 1, 2009

Unhinged Realists

Only Sy Hersh believes that neocon sleeper cells are controlling U.S. foreign policy, but yesterday's launch of the Foreign Policy Initiative has captured the imagination of several writers. The New Yorker's George Packer wrote that FPI was the "ideological descendant" of the Project for the New American Century, which "put the squeeze on Bill Clinton to sign the Iraq Liberation Act, and then provided George Bush with many of his top officials, who ran and wrecked the liberation of Iraq." As former PNAC director Gary Schmitt pointed out in the comments (Schmitt is, apparently, the blog's only commenter), no PNAC official ever worked in the Bush administration (nor did the group "squeeze" the President of the United States). Packer apologized for the error in a subsequent post that contained still more errors (again, see the comment below).

Likewise, Stephen Walt wrote on the launch of FPI:

The platform of the new organization is a watered-down version of the bellicose neoconservative program that worked so well over the past decade, producing a disastrous war in Iraq and a deteriorating situation in Central Asia and bringing America's image around the world to new lows. Neoconservatives also helped derail efforts to reach a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, thereby strengthening Hamas, threatening Israel's future, and further damaging America's global position.

Of course Walt believes that (Jewish) neoconservatives are to blame for all the world's problems, but only one of these charges contains anything more than opinion -- that neoconservatives "helped derail efforts to reach a two-state solution." No one associated with FPI or PNAC ever worked against a two-state solution. This is pure fantasy. In just the last three months THE WEEKLY STANDARD has published two cover stories that envision a two-state solution (including this week's cover story by Gershom Gorenberg). Since Walt is a "scholar," perhaps he has some other evidence to back up his charge, but he fails to provide it.

As for the rest of Walt's rant, one would be on far sturdier ground laying the blame for these failures at the feet of the Bush administration's "realists," who were determined not to do the hard work of state-building in the first place. The good folks at PNAC were calling for more troops from day one, and for Rumsfeld's resignation before the war even started. But none of this much matters, since only Sy Hersh will be able to blame the neocons if this new administration fails to deliver peace in the Middle East -- or will George Packer blame FPI for "putting the squeeze" on another Democratic president?

--Posted by Michael Goldfarb on April 1, 2009 02:57 PM

© Copyright 2008, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2009/04/unhinged_realists.asp

Mr. Walt would have done well to include the agenda and nature of this think tank. It is not inconceivable that men like Kristol and Kagan could be setting this think tank up to refocus on the long-lost domestic agenda (skepticism of social engineering) that was a forebearer to neoconservativism.

From this entry, I am unable to ascertain the nature of the think tank; only a repudiation of the two men who are founding it.

I expect better from Mr. Walt.